The Forest of Fontainebleau covers an area of about 250 square kilometres (almost 100 square miles) to the south-east of Paris. It’s mixed deciduous woodland, much of it ancient, with a royal castle at its centre. Around the edge of the forest are several small villages that have attracted painters since the early nineteenth century, and inspired two schools of painting: Barbizon, named after the village where most of its adherents gathered, and Impressionism. This weekend I show some of their paintings, starting today with examples from the Barbizon period up to the early 1860s.

The forest has been a favourite hunting ground for French kings, and for the Emperor Napoleon.

Among the paintings of François Flameng showing the Napoleonic period, one of the most striking is this scene of Napoleon Hunting in the Forest of Fontainebleau, where the pack is closing in on a cornered stag as the sun sets.

The royal castle, Château de Fontainebleau, was later used by Napoleon III for receptions.

Jean-Léon Gérôme articulated Napoleon III’s aspirations for empire in his elaborate formal painting of the Reception of Siamese Ambassadors by Napoleon III (1864), depicting the grand reception held at Fontainebleau on 27 June 1861. Gérôme attended in the role of semi-official court painter, made sketches of some of the key figures, and was further aided by photographs made by Nadar. He also included himself, and the older artist Ernest Meissonier (1815-1891), in the painting: I believe that they are both at the back, at the far left.

Achille Etna Michallon was one of the first great landscape artists to paint en plein air in the forest. His study of The Fallen Branch, Fontainebleau from about 1816 anticipates the Barbizon School in its motif, style and location. This large branch looks more like a dying animal.

A decade later, the British artist Richard Parkes Bonington visited briefly and both sketched and painted In the Forest at Fontainebleau (c 1825). The rocks here are particularly painterly, suggesting that this may have been started, if not completed, in front of the motif.

Towards 1830, inspired by the paintings of John Constable, several young French landscape painters started visiting the forest. The first was probably Camille Corot, who first painted there in 1822, and returned in earnest in the Spring of 1829, after his long stay in Italy to learn plein air painting technique in the Roman campagna.

In Corot’s Fontainebleau Forest (The Oak) from about 1830, the twisted limbs of the oak have taken time and care, sufficient to give texture and shadows to the trunks and branches. Where the canopy is more broken he painted the leaves in considerable detail.

Corot was joined by Théodore Rousseau, Constant Troyon, Jean-François Millet, Paul Huet, and later Charles-François Daubigny and Henri Harpignies. Although many of their paintings were made in the forest, few have been located with certainty.

When Harpignies was on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, he painted largely en plein air, including this fine view of Fir Trees in Les Trembleaux, near Marlotte from 1854.

The great animalière Rosa Bonheur lived on the edge of the forest, where she painted some fine watercolours, including her Deer in the Forest of Fontainebleau (1862). By that time, the next generation was getting ready to take over from the Barbizon School.